Jan 14 – Feb 11: Back to Malawi to start the vocational schools in Lilongwe and Salima
Please see my full year trip log Sept. 2022 – Sept. 2023
Back to Malawi
Saturday, January 14, 2023
My flight was set to leave at 7:40 AM, so I arranged to have a cab pick me up at 4:30 AM Trinity Airport Hotel. HOWEVER, I got an Email late evening that the flight had been changed to 6:15 AM, so I changed the taxi to 3:30 AM, and arrived to the airport at 4:00 AM…. wondering how many people will arrive too late for the flight. HOWEVER, when I arrived at the airport, I couldn’t check in until after 5:00 AM when Ethiopian Airlines clerks opened check in. HOWEVER, when I got my ticket, I see that boarding time isn’t until 6:55 AM. To the best of my knowledge, we took off at about 7:40 AM.
2:30 PM – 4:30 PM, we had our first organizational meeting for the vocational schools: :LTC and Kindle Orphan Outreach. Victor, Nicolas and I. Additionally, Eddie joined us who has a solar electric company and chairs the regional water board, overseeing water supply for Lilongwe area.
As four techie geeks, we debated design details for the best ISECooker before we cut off the discussion… as we realized that curriculum was way more important, and we had to figure out how we were going to teach this stuff… and buy all the things everyone needs.
Sunday, January 15, 2023
I met Victor and Nicolas at LTC at 10:20 AM, and apologized for being late. Nicolas was elbow deep in the clogged oil pump for his old BMW. We talked about curriculum for an hour and then made a shopping list for tomorrow. I think we can get everything we need for starting the program at Kindle for the $1000 stage one grant from MECS.
We had lunch at an outdoor kiosk/restaurant. AND then Nicolas gave me his mountain bike, so I could ride home… lovely, I am on a bike again.
Tire problems are the order of the time, as I was late for work on Tuesday and discovered a rear flat… a young man marched me a few hundred meters up an alley to a man who fixed the flat for 500 MW (~ 40 cents). Rather than using sand paper, he prepares the innertube surface with a knife. On Sunday, we spent ~ $600 on solar panels and other course materials, and loaded it into Mata’s car as he headed off to Salima with Victor. We were double parked for less than a minute and found the car impounded… much outrage and bickering followed… and a 5000 MK fine. Nick has two BMW’s… both of which he bought for less than $2000. One has an oil pump that’s clogged, the other, he pumps the tire with a pump that has no valve, so he pulls the valve core, pumps the tire and replaces the core as fast as he can before the air escapes… but Sunday, the leak was too fast, and we patched it. That worked well enough for a week… Friday, he bought a new (used) tire. “Rasta” changed the tire, but we had to pick up the car because his jack wasn’t short enough to fit under a sports car.
We’ve been busy at LTC with a small group of motivated, sharp students dedicated to a vocation in solar electricity. In two days, we covered the basic concepts of the solar panel’s I-V curve, thermal flow, and storage technologies. They all built solar cookers out of parts scavenged from the November workshop in Togo, and have moved onto designing and experimenting with different heaters and outer receptacles. We still have a lot of challenges to overcome, but this was the first of a 20 week project. I hope they get field trips to an aluminum foundry and ceramic shop.
In Uganda and Togo, we made pot receptacles with wire mesh – reinforced concrete. In Ghana, we made them from mesh-reinforced plaster of Paris and clay. Clay is clearly the best as for the final product, but requires a couple weeks to make. Concrete is also great and takes a few days to cure. Plaster of Paris is not suitable because it readily absorbs water, but it makes a great prototyping material because it cures in 20 minutes. We bought a 40 kg (35,000 MK) bag of plaster and found to our great disappointment it wasn’t plaster of Paris and didn’t seem to cure at all. It was wall plaster, but actually cured over the course of a few hours… it turned out to be much better than plaster of Paris because we usually need more than the ~ 5 minutes of working time provided by plaster of Paris… AND so far, it seems this wall plaster may not so readily absorb water.
Friday… after my first week working with Nick and the students… end of a week of good, hard work, I announced, “I think we need to go out for a beer?” Turns out, Nick’s standard is roast pork after work, so we went with Joseph, Nick’s new officemate. The intermittent rain required the barbeque to periodically move into shelter.
There were loads of bananas in the corner of the veranda. I picked up a bunch, and a woman appeared, telling me that they were 3000 MK (~ $2). I offered her 2000 MK, and she went off to find the owner to ask if it was OK. She returned a while later saying 2000 MK was good, but instead, I paid 3000 MK and took two enormous avocados as well. We were constantly interrupted by vendors with an armload of shoes, electronics, clothing… shopping at the pub? An armload of shirts? Nick picked a small one for his son, but rejected it for some reason. I need a shirt… tried on one, too small (to everyone’s amusement)… a larger one, nope – it had long sleeves… then a beautiful short-sleeved dress shirt… how much?
- Two – eight
- What? that’s too much!
- Two – five
- You can do 2?
- Take it
total cost, ~ $1.50. and lots of laughs.
It’s the rainy season now in Malawi. Thursday, it rained from the afternoon long into the night. Luckily, I had a plastic bag for my computer. As an afterthought, I put my pants in the plastic bag as well and bicycled home in my boxers. I probably didn’t look any stranger to local folks, being already white. I arrived home coated in mud, but very happy, as there are not many things better than a muddy mountain bike ride. And my pants were clean for the next school day.
There’s been a cholera outbreak in Malawi this past few weeks, resulting in about a thousand deaths. Latrines and maybe flooding rain have contaminated borehole water sources. Chlorinated water is beneficial. I purify the water I drink with my “Crazy Cap” UV bottle. I haven’t seen any signs of cholera here in Lilongwe, but understand it’s more centered south in Blantyre. One of the responses was for the government to close down restaurants that sell cooked food… I’m not sure why this was a solution, but it resulted in a lot of unemployment, for instance, for my friend Tapiwa and the woman she employed. As of Sunday, January 22, it looks as though they are letting restaurants open again.
Below from left, lunch with Nick at a smoky outdoor kitchen. My failed attempt to make a mosquito trap. The purple one, Katchy, caught many mosquitos, but my brighter white light wrapped in cellophane tape caught nothing. The difference is either the white light didn’t attract mosquitoes, or the tape isn’t sticky enough. Next test is to wrap the Katchy in cellophane tape or buy some flypaper.
Last picture, Nick is in an electronics shop in Lilongwe. We wanted to buy flat power diodes. We can buy them on AliExpress for about 300 MK, but the local electronics shop charges 4500 MK. As another example, the round, 2-Amp diodes we buy for less than 2 cents in the States cost 40 cents here. We are presently talking with the electronics shop owner (left in picture) to develop a business relationship whereby he makes large purchases for us in the shipping containers he imports. However, we are also exploring the use of locally available resources such as electric range heating elements that we cut up with a hacksaw as pioneered by ASEI in Fort Portal, Uganda – see late September blog.
Saturday, January 21, 2023
Nick and I visit an aluminum foundry. This is the most creative, progressive foundry I’ve met. They are eager to make new products. Two of their innovations over what I’ve seen before is they use guide bolts shafts to line up the sand molds and they cover the sand surface with ash from the fire, delivered by beating a permeable bag full of ash… resulting in the smoothest aluminum surface I’ve seen
I like how they showcased their failures… we saw two.
They made us a novel pot while we waited. They made us leave while they built the pot, protect their intellectual property of how they do it. I later tell them I’m not compatible with that policy. I want to learn with them and I want to take part in the innovation. I also tell them that there is no lack of market for our products. They are afraid that we will use their technology to make our own foundry. I emphasize that the reason we come to them is because we actively want to NOT do the foundry work ourselves. They agree.
Sunday, January 22, 2023
I get picked up by Mada (accounts assistant for Kindle) at the Game Store in Lilongwe. His wife and child live in Lilongwe, so he commutes weekly. There are money changers in the parking lot that exchange 1460 MK per $US, rather than the 1000 MK that the bank provides. So, if you are traveling to Malawi, bringing cash rather than credit cards provides you with 46% more buying power… actually more because the banks also charge a $5 fee to use the ATM as well as a fee for foreign exchange.
We have lunch at a place that serves American style food for about $3 a plate… three times the cost of the local restaurants. Thus there is a considerable amount of aggressive sales people and beggars around. It’s rather heart-breaking for me. I don’t give anything, but I haven’t found a way to emotionally reconcile my obscene wealth in this context.
Friday, January 27, 2023, after a week of pretty intense teaching at Kindle Orphan Outreach Vocational School with Victor.
Our students here are bright, positive, and hardworking, but from a rural community with a secondary school certificate have less training than the students at LTC (in their second year of their post secondary education dedicated to solar electric technology). I don’t know if anyone had ever asked these students if the side of a square would double or quadruple the area. Language: I speak pretty slowly, but students ask me to slow down… so I do. Cultural differences: it initially seemed physically impossible for any student to disagree with me. I could say the most outrageous falsehoods, and they would supportively agree. At one point, I turned my back and said, “on three, say ‘No, you’re wrong, Pete!’”, and their response was, “Yes, you’re RIGHT, Pete.”. How does one teach critical thinking authoritatively? In any case, by Thursday, students were able to disagree with a false statement.
Victor and I are with the students from 8:30 AM – noon, and then 1:30 PM – 4:00 PM. Mornings are for theory, and afternoons are for practical work. However, that needs to change if we’re going to set up cookers in the morning to cook lunch, and I also think it’s important to not do any one thing for too long. On Monday, we got out solar panels and took measurements of current and voltage.
On Tuesday, we connected resistors to solar panels, and burned some fingers…a little… the thermocouple read 350 C for one ceramic resistor.
Wednesday, some students brought pots and we glued ceramic resistors or sections of a heating element to the bottom of the pots and heated water. We wrapped the pots in insulation inside of plastic buckets.
Thursday, I bought cooking oil, eggplant, tomatoes, onions, a chili pepper, and a knife (for about 50 cents!) and we started the morning by chopping and cooking. It was overcast and we learned that the solar panels put out about ¼ full power in bright, overcast weather, so we put all 4 solar panels on one cooker. At about 1:00, everything as cooked and there was a good amount of vegetable juice in the pot. We pushed the vegetables aside and poured rice into the water and left another 20 minutes… it was great.
Class ended at 3:00 on Thursday for the monthly staff meeting. Principal Mlenga fully included me, both by inviting me as well as translating all discussion into English. Clearly, everyone is excited about the progress of the new solar cooking vocation. I mean, I was sitting in Ellie’s restaurant after closing time yesterday, and a soldier asked me what I’m doing here. He was so excited about the possibility of solar electric cooking and asked how much I charged to teach it. He went on about the need to address climate change and deforestation. When they ask me about the ISECooker production in California, I feel a little frustration when I report that no one is interested in the USA. In this aspect… despite the myriad cultural and language barriers, I feel more at home here than in San Luis Obispo.
Friday, Victor was in Salima, so I started class myself. I bought dried beans, okra, tomatoes, onions, etc. It was sunnier so we had two solar panels on one pot, and one solar panel on each other pot. After they set up, we went inside for our first exam!
Part 1: “I buy a solar panel and want to make an ISECooker.” Here is what is written on the back of the solar panel. What will be the maximum power this puts out, and what resistance should I use to heat the cooker?
Part 2: THEN, I find that I get lower power because it’s overcast, and I measure the short circuit current to be only 2 A. What is the power I get now? If I could change the resistance, what would I change it to, and what power would that give me?
The writing was agonizingly slow folks asked each other for erasers and straight edges… After the first student said he was done with part 1, I told the students to put the exams under their chairs… they protested. I told them that they should talk to each other for 5 minutes and then resume the exam. I gave them another 20 minutes before going over the answers. Then we went outside to check on the cooking before doing part 2 of the exam.
At the end of the day, I was explaining placement of thermal switches to a confused classroom when Mphatso walked up from the back of the room and took the marker from me, leading to spirited debate of the question I’d just asked.
Communication is a challenge, that consistently affects the efficiency of activities. The tools and hardware are kept in a shipping container on campus that is always locked. A young woman is the keeper of the keys and opens the container every evening and inventories what comes in and out. She didn’t feel good and didn’t come for a week. There seemed to be no contingency plan. The principal also has keys, but he was in Salima town… I came from Salima town, and could have met him, but we didn’t know. Could we just keep the keys with the guards that stay there 24/7? The response was that then they would steel from the container. So what do we do? We did get the container opened, and then took out everything we’d need and kept them locked in a separate room, and Bruno (carpentry teacher) has the key… It seems we have better access to our things now, but they are less secure. I get the same feeling of frustration I remember from my two years in Fiji with the Peace Corps… when things don’t work the way “they are supposed to” for what seems to be no good reason. I manage those feelings better now.
Saturday, there was yet another foundry visit. Mphatso, our student knew where it was, and Victor, Mphatso, and the Gerson (the Kindle driver) picked me up around noon.
Then we went off looking for another foundry, “to compare”… and drove South, Blantyre direction along the lake… we found no foundry, although we did find the man who used to have a foundry, but gave it up because the harsh working environment damaged his health. We also found a market with lots of fish from the lake… Victor and Mphatso didn’t buy anything because it was too expensive… the American asks, “did you fight about the price?… this is Malawi.” They hadn’t. Mphatso went back and returned with a small bunch of fish strung through the gills with grass.
Electricity goes out once or twice a day in Malawi… for 5-6 hours, “load shedding”. I’m staying in a luxury hotel for 12,000 MK ($9) /day… breakfast included, and Andy washes my clothes and cooks my dinners for me if I bring home food or pay him to buy the food. It has hot and cold running water (except that the hot water is the same temperature as the cold water), and electricity – when there’s electricity. Andy asked me about solar panels, and what I can do. I arranged for Victor to come talk with Ned, the owner… usually around, always in a great mood. We talked about options and costs. Retrofitting the hotel with a solar-powered battery back up system for lighting might be an ideal “internship” project for the students. TEVETA (Technical Entrepreneurial and Vocational Education and Training), Malawi’s regulating authority dictates that a 5-month vocational program will have 4 months of instruction and a month-long internship, which could be a project.
Monday, January 30, 2023, Back at LTC.
Nick has been out for a week. He was called to a different city to grade national final exams from last semester. I think Joseph was supposed to cover his classes, but the students said they did nothing in solar electricity during that time. Nick thought he’d be back Sunday night, then Monday morning, then Tuesday morning. I showed up and talked about how we link solar cells in series to get a solar panel of more than 0.6 V and how we can hook a DC power source from the grid in parallel with the solar panel in order provide backup when the sun isn’t good… AS LONG AS the DC power supply has a lower voltage than the solar panel’s maximum power point voltage… otherwise, we start driving current backwards through the solar panel! It was raining at the end of the day. I strategically timed my ride home in a lull, but got wet and muddy from puddles anyway, and what’s worse, it wasn’t any fun because I was concentrating on NOT getting muddy, and failed anyway. So, I’ve resolved to carry my soccer shorts / swim suit with me and a ratty T-shirt at all times to change into for wet commutes. We planned how to wire in multiple resistors for changing sunlight intensity, but couldn’t do any hardware work because Nick had locked all the tools up.
Tuesday, January 31, 2023, 11:00 AM
Nick didn’t come this morning, so I gave the students a test and intermittently allowed them to turn their tests over and talk with each other… a technique I use at Cal Poly for some tests early in the quarter. I wanted to apologize for arriving at 8:05, but there were not students there… they came in around 8:30. We had agreed yesterday afternoon to meet at 8:00… what happened? The other classrooms were full at 8:00 AM. There was a funeral?… but no one went to it. The students had a stomach ache? But ultimately 10 of the 12 students showed up. During the test, I reprimanded them for talking with teach other and asked them to do their own work… can you tell I’m having challenges with the cultural differences? I look forward to asking them about it in the afternoon… It’s as important to me that I learn as well as teach. I graded the exams. They did OK, but there’s lots more to learn.
At left, Monday, I dumped a little water on the surface of the plaster cooking surface we made two weeks ago. It didn’t exactly bead up, but it also didn’t absorb the way I’d seen it do on a plaster of Paris surface. Truly, it seems this wall plaster could be the best prototyping material I’ve seen… and possibly usable for a final product too.
Sunday, Feb 5, 2023, 8:00 AM, Back at J&J Lodge, Salima
Feb. 1 marked my “half way” point… 6 months on the road. There was a certain relief at thinking I’m going back…. wondering how long I can continue doing this. Am I tiring? Off to Zambia next Saturday and a new project. We still have no consumer product. Yet, the technology and community continues to grow, improve….
oops, the electricity just went out. But the computer and power bank are charged.
I was going to try to stay with another instructor in the school area, about 20 km to the west (direction Lilongwe), but maybe I’ll just stay here another week. It’s so peaceful here and I’ll be able to work more… work? yes, I’ve made very little progress on the construction manual that we really need. So, today, Sunday, I’ll sit at Ellie’s Restaurant and work on the construction manual and play guitar… as soon as it stops raining.
HISTORIC EVENT: That’s right! Right here in Ellie’s Restaurant; As we introduce to Malawi, Guacamole. We enlisted the help of two Europeans traveling through Malawi because I’ve been gone so long as to have lost calibration of my pallet. We declared our guacamole, on the continuum of goodness, as “pretty good”.
Monday, Feb. 6, 9:30 PM: In bed at J&J Lodge.
The students surprised me with two concrete ISECookers. We tried to use them, but found that concrete is heavy and also not a great insulator.
I planned to meet Ellie at her restaurant at 5:00? But it was closed up when I arrived a little after 5:00. On the way home I called her on Whatspp. Apparently, I’d told her I’d be there around 3:00 and then she sold all the food and went home. We agreed to have dinner at J&J Lodge. I went out to buy lots of good food. Fresh avocados, tomatoes, and a bag of green beans… each was about 20 cents… onions, and rice. You can buy a single serving of salt, but you can’t buy rice in anything smaller than 1 kg.
I got home and Andy said we could cook here, but he needed to buy charcoal for me. I gave him 20 cents and he returned after an hour with the charcoal. By the time he’d returned, I’d received a message from Ellie that she didn’t feel well and she wasn’t coming for dinner. AND, Andy noticed I didn’t have cooking oil. I asked what he was going to fry breakfast with tomorrow morning. He replied he’d buy the oil in the morning before cooking breakfast. They sell cooking oil in tiny plastic bags for probably upwards of 10 cents. I think I gave him 35 cents and he was gone for another half hour while I chopped vegetables. In a place where people will work for 10 cents an hour, time is not valued… resources are valued… where you can buy sections of shredded car tires in stands by the roadside… and someone will ride you on the back of their bike for 10 minutes for 30 cents. When not cooking a meal, the median number of edible items present in a Malawian kitchen is zero… unless you count salt.
The charcoal fire was hot by the time I got the veggies on and dinner was great, although Andy refused to try anything protesting the hot pepper I’d put in. I explained to Andy that I didn’t think to have cooking oil… that in California, I have enough food in my kitchen for about a month, and that I bought about $200 of groceries every other week. He asked if there was a way for him to come to the USA to work. I described the way hopeful immigrants are turned away at the Mexican boarder by armed soldiers…. And vowed to be more mindful to not describe what appears to be American opulence in an effort to share culture.
I just invented the best and most massive mosquito trap… I can’t be the first to have thought of this… but the fan blows the air faster than their flight velocity. So, if you put down the mosquito net and point the fan into it, they’re stuck! Then you come by and smear their little bodies on the mesh at your leisure.
Why don’t Malawians keep food for more than a few hours? Because they are hungry and eat all they have? Because if they keep something, someone else will come by to ask for it? I asked Nick what portion of Malawians are hungry… “lots”… “more than 50%?”… “yes”. People seem so happy and dynamic, yet so many are vulnerable… an accident, a sickness could cost them their lives.
Tuesday, Feb. 7: In bed at J&J Lodge.
The students were excited today… we had a chicken. Victor bought it yesterday for $2, but we botched our timing in the morning and didn’t have the cookers heating until the clouds rolled in, so it lived in a bucket for the day and Mphatso took it home and fed it. But today, we had good sun and quickly assembled two ISECookers driven by a frantic mzungu fretting about losing good sunlight. I interviewed Moses before he dispatched our lunch… “how do you feel about what you are going to do? “FANTASTIC!” he beamed…. Oh, they celebrated! “this is a GREAT day!” … “The chicken is happy!” The chicken was cooked in two stages. First the entire body is put in boiling water for about 5 minutes before plucking the feathers. Everything was eaten except the feathers and contents of the digestive system. The food really was great: Chicken, rice, sautéed veggies.
They shared everything and saved some for the students who had to go home for lunch. Victor and I contributed most of our lunch so that we could also share. Afterwards we took a poll: the chicken and vegetables got a 5/5 as slow cooking is great for meats…, but the rice just got a 2/5. We learned to bring the water to a boil before adding the rice because the water takes so long to heat up.
Wednesday, Feb. 8: 2:00 PM Kindle students are working on their cookers.
The last thing we did yesterday was lay plaster onto wire mesh for the top receptacle surfaces. This morning, interrupted for 20 minutes by morning devotion, with hacksaws and drills, students fit the plaster receptacle surfaces to the plastic containers I brought yesterday. To simplify matters, at least for how, Victor and I are providing about $2.50 a day to get food for the cookers. We decided to do this every evening. Students and staff are supposed to bring contributions for lunch every day, either some food or money. However, I think most of them go without. If we provide the money, we save time and energy, and everyone is happy and invested in the project. Seems a simple solution for now. We announced the idea, asking how much they’d need to fill two cookers, and they exploded in a budgeting frenzy. I stopped them after 10 minutes so we could get back to studies and Victor and I gave one of them 3000 MK – I think… more than they’d asked for.
Victor gave a test today to cover the TEVETA – required material.
Something else special happened today… the students worked through lunch – not just cooking, but checking solar panel power output, changing the wiring. Exciting to see.
We just don’t have enough fiberglass insulation… where did it go? You can’t buy it here. I told the students we could use wood chips. They got a wheelbarrow load from the carpentry group. Dicey. I got a nickname for life among the ME department after the rice hulls caught fire… almost burning down Bonderson? Hard to say how close is “almost”. I stressed that the woodchips are flammable and had to be kept far from the heaters, and preferably far from the cookpot as well. Later, Mphatso prodded me for alternatives… he suggested chicken feathers (hmm, could be)… and then sheep wool… which is perfect! but I didn’t know people threw it away here. We will see.
Ellie couldn’t meet again yesterday evening… she was at a funeral. But that was yesterday!? Oh, a different funeral today… another… one of 5 funerals today: an old man, a few kids, and a baby…. SHIT! What are the children dying of?! “Asthma”… I don’t think so… how about Household Air Pollution (HAP)? Does this make sense? The WHO estimates 4 million HAP deaths annually. These would be concentrated only in places that cook with coal and wood… let’s say 4 billion people. So, annually, 1/1000 people die per year from HAP…. Meaning if your life expectancy is 50 years, you stand a 5% chance of dying of HAP… these deaths are concentrated in children and women because they are in the kitchen, so it’s reasonable to estimate 4% of children die from HAP… but higher in very poor countries like Malawi because of the poverty, undernourishment, lack of healthcare infrastructure… compound the respiratory disease.
Thursday, Feb. 9:
The students bought pork today with the money we gave them. Huge pieces of fat… which we avoid, right?… but this was their food. So, I ate it. OMG! Lovely! We had our first fail, in that the clouds rolled in before the rice water boiled. So, we had no rice. We unpacked this failure and explored improvements in ISECooker construction and protocol that would have prevented this from happening… it could have been worse: we didn’t start with the rice in the cold water.
Joseph, the director of Kindle came by in the afternoon. The sun was out and the students had redeployed the ISECookers to explore power production. He came into the class for about an hour as we discussed solar charge controllers… through a downpour, causing a subsequent sore throat. Before Joseph left, he spoke to the students for a few minutes expressing his excitement for the program, and his gratitude for what we’ve done.
Saturday, Feb. 11, 9:30 AM, Lilongwe Airport:
Turns out my sore throat wasn’t from yelling over the storm-din… I’m sick. Bummer. But it just feels like a regular cold, and I don’t have a fever, so I’m flying… in an hour.
Yesterday, Friday, was my last day for three weeks with the Kindle students and for the first time, it was rainy and overcast all day. But the students were great. The innovated and even started drawing the solar panel I-V curve to decide how to wire the solar panels. I told them I look forward to seeing all they learn and the progress they make on their ISECooker designs while I am away. Truthfully, I think they are very close to a viable consumer product… What needs to be done?:
- I think they need to create a NiCr wire – power lead junction that doesn’t corrode, such as the way Andrew spot welded the junction.
- They need to initiate a strategy to import instruments and materials that are not locally available. These would include either PTCs or thermal switches to control the temperature.
- We need either a locally-available insulation or we must import fiberglass. I encouraged them to look into chicken feathers and fur or wool. From the little research I’ve done, feathers are not very flammable, and I hope they try using them.
- They need to buy the electronics devices I brought, but will take with me when I leave: The power meters and thermocouple readers. Alternatively, they could just measure the voltage on the T/C probes, recognizing that in our temperature range, K-type T/Cs have a near linear relationship with about 25 C / mV. For example, if they measure 5 mV, the temperature would be about 5 * 25 C = 125 C above the temperature of the multimeter junctions… likely about 155 C.
- They could make an agreement with a ceramics studio to make the receptacle out of clay, but at present working with mesh-reinforced plaster would function adequately.